It is my perception that the left is doing better at shutting down opposing speech than the right, and has been since the 90s. If you're going to address the problem that it's happening at all, you have to address the side that's doing it more and better.
Edit: It's generally kids saying these things and I get it that they often just don't know better but it's really night and day how much better things are if there are some boundaries.
I can sympathize, because I've yet to find a word that causes me pain by any stretch of the word "pain." There's no phrase, sentence, or utterance that has bothered me. I've been called all manner of racial epithets, gender epithets, and even sexual orientation epithets. I just can't bring myself to give a shit - nobody trying to hurt me is worth my time and so I ignore them / move on / mock them / laugh in their face.
I genuinely cannot put myself in the shoes of people who, for example, would feel a form of pain/offense at hearing the "n" word, for example. From my perspective, that would be just a great indication that whoever is using that word is not worth a millisecond of my time.
HOWEVER, I'm a straight white male that makes 140,000$/year and have no diseases whatsoever. So when my black friends tell me that certain words cause them pain, I believe them, because everyone's different.
I feel fear on rollercoasters to the point where I simply will not ride them. Some friends love rollercoasters. Objectively, I should not feel fear on rollercoasters. They are safer than hopping on my motorcycle for my 10 minute, 2 mile commute home. But, I do. So, I can take that experience and say "situations exist where I feel different emotions than other people do, for said situation." While I can't imagine what it feels like to hear a word and feel pain / offense, I can believe people when they tell me that a certain word makes them feel those negative emotions.
I'm not sure how to convince other friends that it's worth the effort to apply this baseline level of mutual respect. I wish I knew why I'm willing to respect others' feelings around words so I could share this learning. I guess, to me, it's logical? If someone wants to be referred to as male despite "appearing" female, don't throw a fucking hissy fit, just do it, who gives a shit? If people are saying "it's not cool to call people retards anymore," just... don't... do it... what are you actually losing? The ability to be an asshole to people in a certain specific way?
Part of Dr. Haidt's point is that yes, people's psyche's have been made fragile by overprotection. I think he even tries to put some science behind that claim.
Being a jerk isn't a good thing, and showing people respect is. But sometimes showing respect means expecting other people to demonstrate some resilience. It's how that resilience grows. Exposure therapy works for many things.
Having resilience is especially important when other things are at stake, things like the truth. If we sacrifice our willingness to speak the truth for fear of causing others emotional pain, we sacrifice too much.
Consider your fear for rollercoasters. I do not think it is right to mock you for it, nor to force you to ride one. Nor do I think you should be trapped by your fear, and I will laud you if you overcome it. I especially don't think that we should (hypothetically) remove all rollercoasters just because some people are afraid of them.
You should always be willing to speak your truth but society is allowed to reject it. It'll be wrong a decent amount of the time but it corrects over time through things like the civil rights movement or the rise of feminism. Interestingly in my experience being unable to reject ideas as a society actually slows down that progress as you'll then just always be relitigating past issues.
Edit: I guess the question to me is "where do you draw the line" and the answer seems to be pretty obviously "you let people draw their own line" in like 98% of situations. Generally by paying attention or just asking people it's been a pretty easy rule to live by and people seem to appreciate it.
Pet peeve: there is no "your" truth or "my" truth. There is "the" truth. It has many facets, and can be difficult to grasp fully, but it either is true or it is not.
My point is that people need to have the legal and social freedom to be able to say controversial things that might be true. That, in order to explore and discover the truth, we must risk offense.
>I guess the question to me is "where do you draw the line" and the answer seems to be pretty obviously "you let people draw their own line" in like 98% of situations.
Unless I've misunderstood you, "letting people draw their own line" sounds a lot like freedom of speech. More precisely, our freedom to hear the ideas of other people and draw our own conclusions should not be abridged just because someone may be offended by that speech.
If you agree with that assessment, then you and I are fine.
I will agree that not every thought is appropriate to voice in every circumstance. There is a need for setting bounds on "polite" conversation. However, not every is (or should be) polite conversation.
I'd say "because whatever else those people are, they're human, and therefore deserve a certain amount of respect", but I'm not sure even that would convince some people.
If I was talking to someone on the right, I might even quote "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [humans] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator..." and then argue that "those people", being created by God, are worth a certain amount of respect just for that reason, without needing any other. I mean, if you're dealing with a right-wing atheist, it won't fly, but it might work as a general thing.
Disclaimer: I just thought of this argument. I have never tried it out in real life, so I don't know what reaction it would get.
But picking one form of "silencing" (people whose invitations to speak on university campuses were withdrawn, blocked, or cancelled due to threats of violence), and measuring it by how much I read about it in the press, it appears that the right is blocked more than the left. And the press is not currently disposed present things in a way that makes the right look more sympathetic.
I hold public universities to a higher standard than private ones in this regard. It's more acceptable in my view for a private university to have a bias (either left or right), and to enforce it, than it is for a public university.
The FIRE database cited -- https://www.thefire.org/research/disinvitation-database/ -- also doesn't make the distinction between public and private. They do leave out religious institutions. I'm sincerely not trying to play gotcha games here; I'm suggesting that your perceptions may have been shaped by a very convincing publicity campaign over the course of decades.
I spent some time with this dataset today (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eeTHZQOh9faZ2P3C_O3s...) just for the sake of resetting my perceptions and validating how I felt. It was a pretty useful exercise.
And, finally, the Princeton Review list of the most conservative student populations in the US: https://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings?rankings=mo... That's a survey, doesn't touch on faculty attitudes, and is no doubt flawed in other ways. But man, I went to college at a state school in a rural state. It's fascinating how quickly people assume that UC Berkeley is the typical public university.
In my argument, I assumed that wasn't possible, because the press leans left, and therefore would not be amenable to selling a "very convincing publicity campaign over the course of decades" if that campaign favored the right. I recognize that that's an argument, not data.
Looking at the FIRE data, there was a large predominance of "from the left" challenges (whether successful or not, whether at a public school or not) in 2016 and 2017. It moved back toward (not all the way to) even in 2018 and 2019. So maybe it was just a temporary thing? Or maybe the right learned how to play the game better?
But, this is prejudice - there is no authority structure in "the left," it's a totally amorphous set of political / ethical ideals that's honestly terribly defined.
So there's two issues I take with this statement:
1. What is "the left?" Can we actually draw a border around it in a way that lets us make the statement, "the left controls the public universities?" I'll hazard that you'll find, within public university administrations, people pro- and anti-choice, people pro- and anti- gun control, supporters of total Israeli sovereignty alongside protesters of Israeli's government, fiscal conservatives alongside socialists... I'm not trying to dispute that public university staff "lean left," but I just don't agree that there's some secret cabal of "leftists" who all agree with eachother.
2. Left-leaning staff are not card-carrying members of an organization (I mean, outside the Democrat party or something) that directs their actions. The definition "the left" arises from a shared set of political beliefs, not the other way around, like a political party. I.e., the democrat party (kinda) represents a certain set of ethics, and you join it if your ethics are aligned. But "the left" is not something you join, it is a description of the majority amalgamation of your beliefs.
[Edit: By the way, let me just say how much I have appreciated the tone of this discussion with you, neaden, and BryantD. I have felt that thoughtful people who disagreed with me were reasoning with me. I have not felt slammed or yelled at. It's been what an HN discussion ought to be.]
I will say though that while most professors tend to be liberal we should remember that most people who go to college go to either Community College (which doesn't really have a lot of political speakers) or large state universities which tend to have institutional inertia to not get swept up in politics. Liberal public universities like UC Berkley are the exception, not the rule.
Where do students hold a position of real power, especially a position where they are inflicting violence on Nazis?
Where is this debate happening?
And once we look at riots in Berkeley, the guy who went a-shooting congressmen, or fine folks who had beaten up a gay POC journalist (a Quillette journalist, but still), well, not all of them are students, but they are doing just fine inflicting violence on whoever they designate as "Nazis", or "Fascists" or whatever the scare word is today.
In that case I bring out all the right wing terrorists of the past decade.
Christchurch shooter, Charleston church shooter, Charlottesville car attacker, Bundy ranch hostages, pro-Trump agitators in the Berkley protest you list, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, Colorado planned parenthood shooting, Layfayette trainwreck shooting, Norwegian Brevik mass shooting, Comet Pizza and many Q-Anon related murders, it goes on and on.
It appears the right wing is increasingly violent and radical, which has many people worried.
Fascism starts with violence, anyone who recognizes the threat posed by right-wing terrorism understandably would want to stop it before it goes further. The world has seen where that ideology has taken us before, unfortunately it seems to be fading from collective memory.
I do find it interesting that any time antifa gangsters go on a rampage it's always because there are some "armed agitators", and basically they asked for it, and it's no big deal anyway, but one right-wing nutjob does something and it's always a part of some "vast right-wing conspiracy". These double standards are rather tiresome, especially if you manage to still remember that left-wing governments are way ahead of rightwingers in body count.